A Place In Time: Colonial Middlesex County, VA, 1650-1750 (ICPSR 35057)

Version Date: Jun 15, 2016

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Principal Investigator(s):
Darrett Rutman, University of Florida; Anita Rutman, University of Florida

Series:

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR35057.v1

Version V1

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Summary

This dataset was produced by Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman while researching their book A Place in Time: Middlesex County Virginia, 1650-1750 and the companion volume, A Place in Time: Explicatus (both New York: Norton, 1984). Together, these works were intended as an ethnography of the English settlers of colonial Middlesex County, which lies on the Chesapeake Bay. The Rutmans created this dataset by consulting documentary records from Middlesex and Lancaster Counties (Middlesex was split from Lancaster in the late 1660s) and material artifacts, including gravestones and house lots. The documentary records include information about birth, marriage, death, migration, land patents and conveyances, probate, church matters, and government matters. The Rutmans organized this material by person involved in the recorded events, producing over 12,000 individual biographical sheets. The biographical sheets contain as much information as could be found for each individual, including dates of birth, marriage, and death; children's names and dates of birth and death; names of parents and spouses; appearance in wills, transaction receipts, and court proceedings; occupation and employers; and public service. This process is described in detail in Chapter 1 of A Place in Time: Middlesex County Virginia, 1650-1750. The Rutmans' biographical sheets have been archived at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, Virginia. To produce this dataset, most of the sheets were photographed (those with minimal information -- usually only a name and one date -- were omitted). Information from the sheets was then hand-keyed and organized into two data tables: one containing information about the individuals who were the main subjects of each sheet, and one containing information about children listed on those sheets. Because individuals appear several times, data for the same person frequently appears in both tables and in more than one row in each table. For example, a woman who lived all her life in Middlesex and married once would have two rows in the children's table -- one for her appearance on her mother's sheet and one for her appearance on her father's sheet -- and two rows in the individual table -- one for the sheet with her maiden name and one for the sheet with her married name. After entry, records were linked in order to associate all appearances of the same individual and to associate individuals with spouses, parents, children, siblings, and other relatives. Sheets with minimal information were not included in the dataset. The data includes information on 6586 unique individuals. There are 4893 observations in the individual file, and 7552 in the kids file.

Citation

Rutman, Darrett, and Rutman, Anita. A Place In Time: Colonial Middlesex County, VA, 1650-1750. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2016-06-15. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR35057.v1

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Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Smallest Geographic Unit

county

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
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Time Period(s)

1650 -- 1750

Data Collection Notes

  1. The IDS Metadata file (DS5) is currently unavailable for download. This collection will be updated to include the IDS Metadata file when it is received.

  2. ICPSR is distributing the Middlesex County demography data in two formats: (1) as a standard ICPSR full product suite (including ASCII data files, setup files, and SPSS, SAS, and Stata data files) with datasets in rectangular format; and (2) as Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) formatted files.

    IDS files are comma delimited with column headings in the first row; text strings are surrounded by double quotes ("), and some strings include commas (,) and other non-alphanumeric characters. The IDS package consists of two data files (or "tables" in IDS database terminology), including:

    1. An INDIVIDUAL table (35057-0003-Data-indiv.txt) which consists of attributes belonging to a person .
    2. An INDIVIDUAL to INDIVIDUAL table (35057-0004-Data-indiv-indiv.txt) which characterizes relationships between persons.

    The IDS files are included to facilitate analyses of the longitudinal data contained within this collection. Filesets 5 through 7 are IDS metadata, entity mapping, and relationship mapping files. For a detailed overview of the IDS table composition, please see the ICPSR Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) Manual.

  3. The ICPSR Codebook features variable descriptions and frequencies for Part 1: Middlesex County Individual Data, and Part 2: Middlesex County Kids Data. Parts 3 through 7 are Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) formatted tables and associated documentation, and are not represented in the Variable Description and Frequencies section of the ICPSR Codebook.

  4. The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) Manual includes descriptions for all IDS table types, including the INDIVIDUAL table, the INDIVIDUAL to INDIVIDUAL table, the CONTEXT table, the INDIVIDUAL to CONTEXT table, and the CONTEXT to CONTEXT table; this release does not include each IDS table type.

  5. There are discrepancies between the earliest and latest dates present in the data (an individual's year of birth in 1617, and an individual's year of death in 1860, respectively) and the study time periods and time frames provided by the data depositor. The dates indicated in the metadata fields "Study Time Periods and Time Frames" are those provided to ICPSR when the collection was deposited. No additional information was provided.

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Study Purpose

The purpose of the data collection was to develop an ethnography of the English settlers of colonial Middlesex County, Virginia, which lies in the Chesapeake Bay.

Study Design

The Rutmans created this dataset by consulting documentary records from Middlesex and Lancaster Counties (Middlesex was split from Lancaster in the late 1660s) and material artifacts, including gravestones and house lots. The documentary records include information about birth, marriage, death, migration, land patents and conveyances, probate, church matters, and government matters. The Rutmans organized this material by person involved in recorded events, producing over 12,000 individual biographical sheets. The biographical sheets contain as much information as could be found for each individual, including dates of birth, marriage, and death; children's names and dates of birth and death; names of parents and spouses; appearance in wills, transaction receipts, and court proceedings; occupation and employers; and public service. This process is described in detail in Chapter 1 of A Place in Time: Middlesex County Virginia, 1650-1750 (New York: Norton, 1984).

Sample

The original data collection was not sampled. However, in computerizing this resource, biographical sheets with only a name and one date were not included. The Rutmans' biographical sheets have been archived at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, Virginia. Due to the nature of the sources and the design of the study, data are most complete for people who spent their entire lives in Middlesex County. They are more complete for men than for women because they had more opportunities to leave traces in the public record, and are more complete for whites than for African-Americans, most of whom appear in the record as slaves with little information.

Time Method

Longitudinal: Cohort / Event-based

Universe

English settlers of colonial Middlesex County, Virginia.

Unit(s) of Observation

individual

Data Type(s)

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Original Release Date

2016-06-15

Version History

2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:
  • Rutman, Darrett, and Anita Rutman. A Place In Time: Colonial Middlesex County, VA, 1650-1750. ICPSR35057-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2016-06-15. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR35057.v1

2016-06-15 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

  • Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.
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Weight

The data are not weighted.

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Notes

  • The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.